Maya DirectX 11 Technology Preview - Update 2

These images and movies are a technology preview. Autodesk wishes to caution you that this preview reflects technology research, and that actual events or results could differ materially from the preview. Also, this preview is not intended to be a promise or guarantee of future delivery of products, services or features but merely reflects technology research, which may change. Purchasing decisions should not be made based upon reliance on this preview. Autodesk does not assume any obligation to update any statements we make to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date of this technology preview.

Here’s a little more clarification on what you are seeing in the images below. First, and as you may have noticed I could not comment on anything about anything until the technology had been announced. This was a ‘technology preview’.

In the images below I included a little bit of the Maya UI to hint at the fact that these images are unedited screen grabs directly from the Maya viewport. The physical number of 1.5fps refresh rate is a reflection of refresh rate because I’m not interacting with this model. When the camera is static the fps drops completely as it should. It wouldn’t be good if it said 20fps while taking screen grabs because it would simply be inaccurate.

In actuality I’m getting between 10-20 fps refresh rates on this model and that is with AO, DOF, Multi-pixel AA, Gamma, as well as ‘floating point render target’ enabled. This is in addition to a very healthy load of large vector displacement exr’s (and that is not counting diffuse, spec, normal, reflection maps etc.) that provide for all the detail and makes up the difference between the wire screenshot and the mapped model. In short, and in general, the viewport is getting faster and better at displaying complex information such as vector displacement, which will hopefully make it much more useful and productive.

Third but not least, all these stats are from a laptop with a Quadro 4000m with 2GB of memory on the card … nice hardware but nothing custom or highest end.

Thanks!

Save the images to your desktop and see the full resolution. Model and textures by Jesse Sandifer, images by Marcel de Jong.

More updates and information later, thanks for checking it out!

The raw base model in the Maya viewport:

Next is the model with textures:

.. and one more:

Thanks.

35 Comments

sam10bw

Posted 1 August 2012 10:24 pm

That's unreal I hope that will be in the next release!

waz mack

Posted 1 August 2012 11:10 pm

This is next level. congratulations. all you need to do now is bring it to life with some Motion Capture.

Wolvawab

Posted 1 August 2012 11:19 pm

Delicious!!!

Dennis H

Posted 2 August 2012 12:16 am

Awesomeness!!!

ARARAT

Posted 2 August 2012 12:58 am

هذا المايا شي خيالي

ARARAT

Posted 2 August 2012 12:58 am

just wonderful

NB-DanTE

Posted 2 August 2012 1:06 am

amazing tech

babygenius55

Posted 2 August 2012 2:27 am

Ummm, what exactly is the technology we are checking out? Is this supposed to be an unbaised render result that uses GPU resources for DirectX technology? Is it OpenCL, or CUDA enhanced? I am quite confused here.

RoninJedi

Posted 2 August 2012 2:45 am

Babygenius55
It looks like a new feature to viewport 2.0 that uses the DirectX 11 feature of most modern day Videocards.
I think Max uses it in the nitro viewport.
Possible real-time vector displacement and other DirectX 11 features you would see in some games.

I want to know what type a machine its running on like they showed with mudbox tech preview. and can it be animated in viewport.

MonsieurH

Posted 2 August 2012 3:01 am

4 icons are added to the 3d viewport (5-8) in the right,
I think for (displacement, occlusion, blur and bump)
the three images are with bump

tomanek-AAAstudio

Posted 2 August 2012 5:35 am

This features and much more has FurryBall for Maya already couple of years:
http://furryball.aaa-studio.eu/

Braden99

Posted 2 August 2012 9:44 am

Awesome. How about a real-time ocean shader, with displacement mapping - something DX11 should excel at

dikkid

Posted 2 August 2012 10:29 am

Really cool! Fantastic!!

langdon

Posted 2 August 2012 11:42 am

do people really care this much about the look of the viewport? Isnt just a waste of resources since there are more important things to address?

Seriously...did you guys check Maxon/SideFX/Luxology/Pixologic updates/development? This is embarassing.
You call this news? Updates? for a 6k software and all the money autodesk charges us with subscription?

And people go "wow, cool fantastic, amazing" with this?

duttyfoot

Posted 2 August 2012 1:07 pm

langdon i couldn't agree more with your comment. even though this is a preview of something, it would be nice if a better explanation was given.

dbowker3d

Posted 2 August 2012 2:35 pm

For the naysayers, you are not thinking this through. I won't disagree that many things need addressing in any of AD's products, with bugs seemingly being added with each new release. But but I can tell you that having the possibility of high-quality view-port display, even if it's half as good as shown here, CAN be a huge plus. Maybe not for everyone, but for many if not most animators.

I'm mostly a 3DSMax user, and when they implemented the new(er) Nitrous display last summer my ENTIRE workflow changed. I can now blast out a full-res HD 1,200 frame preview animatic that gets me about 60% of my final render look in under 10 minutes (this is 8 million polys or more). This in turn allows my clients to see and evaluate something very close to the final animation, and even better allows me to set up my final After Effects composition well before all my real frames come back. I can be editing, building in effects and everything else at the beginning of a project instead of the later stages. Evaluation of movement, lighting and potential animation mistakes are all now hugely improved.

So yeah, it might be a big deal.

Joseph Horvath

Posted 2 August 2012 4:54 pm

Love it!I hope it's in the 2013 SAP!

toha

Posted 2 August 2012 5:00 pm

Hope it's supports volume shader and fluids

SreckoM

Posted 2 August 2012 5:15 pm

And this means no Mac or Linux support ...

mjmurdoc

Posted 3 August 2012 1:32 am

Cool... but that's a SUPER SLOW frame rate you've got...especially seeing at most game engines running DX11 can do 30 or 60 FPS. (and they have to render entire levels, plus dynamics, plus post fx)

I would definitely prioritize MODELING and RENDERING improvements over Viewport 2.0 though. Those are the areas where maya has fallen behind most other applications out there. (modo, zbrush, silo, 3DSMAX)

Hope to start seeing "Technology Previews" in those areas soon!

tristratos

Posted 3 August 2012 6:17 am

Sorry to say, but "1.5 fps" as seen in the last picture, for such a feature is a tragedy!!

Especcially when these kind of features do exist in other apps (like as said zbrush for example as well as DX11 games) that are nearly realtime!!

I just hope things will be optimized to hanlde them better in the final port!!

Neit Sabès

Posted 3 August 2012 8:16 am

The unavoidable "windows-ification" of Maya. So sad.
As if it was not possible to achieve the same feature using OpenGL. Thanks to the game lobby...

Gheromo

Posted 3 August 2012 10:23 am

looks awesome, just like usual viewport 2... which was crap... Maya is falling behind...

nickzucc

Posted 3 August 2012 12:20 pm

In my opinion this is great news for us game artist, the closer I can get in Maya to the look of what I will see in something like UDK is a good thing. I hope the 1.5 FPS is addressed, that is not good, but I try to spend as much time in viewport 2.0 these days as possible. I would really like to see fake SSS like what UDK has. I would also like to see viewport 2.0 work with all tools, such as 3D texture projections, you have given us a cool tool that we would like to use but you haven't given us full support for that tool. While we are on that subject, I would really like to see all things Maya Software work the same in Maya Mental Ray. You are making it very hard for your users to know what works and where. It makes everything feel as if it is in a state of brokenness.

digitalfx

Posted 3 August 2012 12:23 pm

i was looking forward to working at 1.5fps. but for that i would probably have to spend a ton of money on a new Quadro card.

i was looking forward to try figuring out if the new directX viewport will match my render. wait, what? it will not match my render? then why would i use it? because it's cool you say? i get it!

gotta switch to houdini cause i can't use this cool thing any more. i'm not ready for another cool feature.

sorry!

melchiormeijer

Posted 5 August 2012 11:03 am

I wonder if sub surface scattering will be supported

reallyimmaturenick

Posted 5 August 2012 8:39 pm

Softimage for the win. Max/Maya are dinosaurs that need to evolve or die.

timd1971

Posted 6 August 2012 2:52 pm

look out max NITROUS.

I've really got this funny feeling the (3) top dogs are going to get merged into (1). (they say no...but I don't believe it) They are all just so frickn similar in many ways...yes, also differnt in many ways.

3ds, Maya and SI... basically take the best features of SI and KILL it.... take "everything" Maya has...and as for Max... probably take the arch/viz portion and kill it altogether since Maya can take up it's slack quite easily since max is getting worse with every new release....then takes a FULL year to even seriously utilize it?

Obvioulsy this SUPER 3D APP would be able to open all 3D formats to easily migrate animations, scenes and models and roll from there hopefully in a direction where everything "JUST WORKS" moving forward from that point and don't look back.

Easier said then done... but which has been admitted, the 3ds max team is apparently understaffed, ....and just needs to join the maya/si team for a free ride from here on out.

Can't beat em join em.

PS, SI isn;t all that.... main problem even as powerful as it is, not enough established huge userbase like Maya or Max.

Cory Mogk

Posted 10 August 2012 7:17 pm

Don't get hung up on the 1.5fps. The scene is static (nothing is moving, not even the camera) so Maya doesn't have to refresh at a higher frame rate.

CrisM

Posted 11 August 2012 12:11 am

I was at siggraph and saw the demo, it was running at 20 to 30 fps. The reason you see 1.5fps is because there was no movement while doing the screen capture so it did not have to refresh screen as much. The dx11 display does look super sweet and clean. Looking forward to this feature.

PS: I hope we can render out in this mode. With all the usual passes for the comps.

homeslice

Posted 11 August 2012 4:46 pm

To address the elephant in the room;

Does this mean that we can now buy our Geforce 670, 675 and 680 GPUs for Maya?

MDJ

Posted 11 August 2012 6:17 pm

Hey everyone,
I added some detail with regards to what I used and what you're seeing at the top of this blog post.

Nima

Posted 20 August 2012 6:09 pm

woooowww...very nice!
I Love Maya ...!!!

JimX

Posted 5 September 2012 7:08 pm

I think that its supposed to render MentalRay materials too !
Why would I have to remake all the materials for DX just for a preview ? Usefull just for games developers.